Site of the Month Featured Site: Space and Culture
One of the fun bits about teaching Engineering this summer was the section on "green design" and "green engineering" (the focus of the class). An interesting thing was how similar some of the concerns of engineers--at least those I was reading about--were to those of us who are IR specialists. Questions of space, power and culture and intersections among those were key.
For our irregular "site of the month" section*, I've added
Space and Culture, a weblog that talks about innovative ways in which space/culture intertwine. It's got lovely pictures too--go check it out.
* Obviously I should pay more attention to what I'm writing before I post it--for the "Featured Site" section, I should have said.
Labels: interdisciplinarity, pop culture, site of the month, space
Testing the waters: fanvids as artistic expression
Perhaps foolishly, I promised Priya that I'd start posting more often. So. The posts may be shorter than usual, but I'll try and link to some interesting stuff that has some relationship to academia.
First up: a link to an introduction to fanvids.
Ephemeral TracesYou may have noticed, Loyal Reader, that Priya and I have more than a passing interest in popular culture. For me, at least, this extends into an interest in how popular culture is reworked by audiences and the public (including a recent paper on the creation and posting of fanvids for the First World War) and fanvids as a genre are a big part of that.
Kristina's post is both a decent introduction to the concept and development of fanvidding and a way to start exploring the limitations that vidders and fandom put on the popularity of their works.
She's limited her recommendations to pieces available on imeem, a hosting platform similar to youtube, and thereby excluded any number of influential and iconic vids posted elsewhere. This was mainly a question of access--many vids are available only through password-protected sites because of copyright questions--but it does tend to skew the choices to newer vids in particular fandoms with a strong imeem presence.
She's also attempting to create an introduction that requires little deep knowledge of particular canon sources or fan history, which means that some videos (those requiring additional knowledge of dominant pairings, the dynamics of slash fandoms, foundational fanfic tropes, and fandom histories) are excluded. This isn't a problem, so much as an example of an internal fandom mechanism for limiting the audience for the vids. Many of the pieces left out require a particular level of commitment from the viewer that makes them especially successful in fannish circles but potentially incomprehensible outside the confines of a given fandom.
Even so, her choices (especially regarding multifandom vids) offer a strong selection of the varieties of vids and the popular fandoms for them.* In addition, she spends some time deconstructing the choices, creating a way in for viewers who are new to the concept of reworking texts in this manner.
It's a post that ought to be read by anyone interested in popular culture or fandom studies.**
* I do quibble with her inclusion of here's luck's "In the Mirror" as a stand-alone video. It's really best understood as one half of a duet, and makes much more sense when viewed along with "Out Here," another piece by the same vidder.
Not that such arguments couldn't be made for most of these vids (it's a conversational medium, after all) but that omission is especially glaring, given that "Out Here" is iconic in the fandom in question.
It's available on imeem,
here. I'd suggest watching "Out Here" first, and then viewing "In the Mirror."
[ETA: To be fair, she does point out that "In the Mirror" is a sequel. And I suspect that her decision not to use "Out Here" may be related to the limitations of imeem, which doesn't allow the particular editing style of "Out Here" to come through.]** Fair warning: imeem vids begin playing as soon as the window opens. As with youtube, it's a good idea to pause the videos while they load in order to get the full effect.
[ETA: Note that Ephemeral Traces has a sidelink to "An Archive of Our Own," about which I will have more to say later.]Labels: critical analysis, fandom, pop culture
